well, digital > analog. and lou reed had no idea what he was talking about.

personally? i'm not into this streaming service idea. i want to interact directly with artists. it doesn't matter how this is done, it's just creating a bourgeois layer. in order to pay for the bourgeois layer, you either need to not pay the artists or put prices through the roof. then you're just overcharging to pay marketing departments. and, i think that's the reason they're trying to put an artist face on this. i think they understand this, even if the consuming public doesn't quite understand it quite yet.

these services have some use - as a kind of a library. spotify is great if it's full of pink floyd records. as a way to house new music? i think this has no future. in the long run, it becomes a closed space for major label artists, because independent artists and independent labels abandon it.

i think you want to forget about spotify as a model. i think the future looks more like bandcamp...

it's a step forwards, though. people pay $100/month for cable. that's a more realistic price to make this sustainable. if nobody gets there, or seems willing to move in that direction, then these services all fail.

as an artist, my primary condition for signing up to something like this is that i want an exchange value on a per-second basis written into a contract that is not dependent on revenue. that is, i'd want to lease the rights to the music to the streaming site. and it's not going to be fractions of pennies on the stream. it's going to be between ten and twenty-five cents per stream, depending on it's length. not once. every time you listen to it...

that has to be in writing, irreversibly. not interested? not signing....

and i don't really care how they charge you, either. i might suggest that a minutely rate is a better idea than a flat rate. but i'm carrying out a transaction with the managers of the service, not with the customer. i don't really like it, but that's how i'm forced to look at it. that transaction is for the use of my art. how they sell it is their concern.